DAG’s 'City As A Museum' Returns To Kolkata Examining Art As A Form Of Cultural Resistance

For six years, DAG’s The City As A Museum has brought the museum into the city, and then turned the city itself into an exhibit. Returning to Kolkata for its sixth edition, the festival turns to cultural resistance and the histories of artistic practice that have articulated the ordinary person’s right to the city.

The main anchor is Open City, an exhibition at the Alipore Museum that opens on November 13 and runs until November 22, closed on Mondays. It brings together paintings, drawings and archival material from the 1940s to the 1990s, charting how a city in turmoil became fertile ground for art rooted in resistance, collectivism and hope. The opening evening pairs a walkthrough with an illustrated talk by Dr Nandini Ghosh on how Bengal’s modern artists answered political strife and social upheaval in the second half of the twentieth century.

Over the following days, the festival moves across the city traversing the expanse of the entire city. On November 14, writer Maitreyee Choudhury leads a participatory poetry reading at Basanta Cabin on the Hungryalist movement, whose artists defied social, literary and visual norms by centering marginalised lives and an aesthetic of coarseness. The next day, Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 screens at the Alipore Museum, followed by conversations with cultural critic Supriya Chaudhuri and economist Rajesh Bhattacharya. At Sovabazar Nat Mandir on November 15 and 16, Ninad Sammadar’s participatory performance The House that Remembers revisits the solidarity meeting and libel proceedings around Rev. James Long’s translation of Nil Darpan, the play tied to the Indigo Rebellion of 1859.

At ‘The City As A Museum’, art is not restrained to just one form or medium. Like  artist and author Ashok Bhowmick talk at Ganashakti on Chittaprosad and other artists whose practice embodied Left activism and people’s struggles or sports historian Kausik Bandyopadhyay examinatio of football as a visual spectacle and a form of cultural self-expression in colonial and postcolonial Bengal along with a conversation with Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar, captain of the 1981 Women’s World Cup, on the gendered dynamics of the sport. 

Music gets its turn on November 19 at Presidency University’s Prangon, where musicologist Arka Chakraborty traces the rise of jibanmukhi gaan against the campus radicalism of the 1970s, with archival readings and an unplugged tribute to the sonic experiments of Moheener Ghoraguli. 

For the final weekend from November 20 to 22, artist Sanchayan Ghosh’s public installation We the People takes over the plaza at Dakshinapan, staging a convention for gathering, making and sharing knowledge, inspired by Nandalal Bose’s depictions of everyday life and labour for the 1938 Haripura Congress. On November 22, Jadavpur University hosts Dewal Likhon Nishedh, a look at wall writing as political history, where lettering artist Sanjoy Kumar Mondal writes a wall live while the acoustic group Laal-On sings songs of resistance.

This edition makes the argument that a city’s history is not locked behind glass. Kolkata has had an eventful year, marked by both good and bad, and the city has tried to accommodate all that change. Through a change in power and its place in the national protest movement that swept the country over the year, the city’s public spaces have been vandalised, destroyed, or have even vanished. But the city continues to persevere. The City As A Museum highlights that historic perseverance, what the walls and songs of a place have survived, and how they will continue to do so, regardless of what the people in power think or want.

Learn more via their website.

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